“Where is my money going?” “How much should I save each month?”

Understanding the only 5 uses of money can help create clarity in your finances.

The Live, Give, Owe, Grow model can be your guide.

• Live: All your bills and “regular” spending – hardest to calculate so back into it for accuracy.
• Give: If you consider generosity a productive use of money with lasting impact, prioritize it rather than just give from the remainder.
• Owe: Owe debt, owe taxes. There’s that extra use of money! Minimize debt, especially consumptive use. Owing taxes is symptomatic of income and wealth so count your blessings then try to minimize wisely.
• Grow: Make your money work for you for greater impact in the future.

Make your own Live, Give, Owe, Grow chart. Plan which areas you want to increase and which to decrease. Revisit each year and set new goals.

Watch Here:

Show Notes:

• Live, Give, Owe, Grow
• An Alternative to Budgeting
• Mitch Anthony
• Ron Blue

Full transcript:

SPEAKERS

Anthony Saffer & Alex Okugawa

Alex Okugawa 0:00

How much can I be giving and how much should I be saving? Where is my money going? Today we’re gonna discuss the five uses of money through the use of the Live, Give, Owe, Grow Model. Stay tuned.

Hi there, this is Alex Okugawa and Anthony Saffer at One Degree Advisors. Today, we’re at the Kingdom Advisors conference in Orlando, Florida. If you like today’s video, please like and subscribe for more. So you know, Anthony, we recently had a client who came to us and they’re trying to figure out, like, how much should I be giving? How much can I be saving? Where’s my money going? Because let’s face it like most people do not budget they do not want to budget either.

Anthony Saffer 0:40

Finances can get over-complicated, but we break it down to there are five uses of money, which we’re going to talk about today.

Alex Okugawa 0:46

Which I know is blasphemy for a lot of people because they’re like, you can, you know, categorize these 18 million ways like, how much am I spending on groceries, etc. Now the Live, Give, Owe, Grow Model was inspired by Ron blue. So he wrote Master Your Money. Also, Mitch Anthony wrote The New Retirementality. The key here is simplicity. You don’t want to overthink this.

Anthony Saffer 1:08

And Live, Give, Owe, Grow. It sounds like four but we’re going to talk about five.

Alex Okugawa 1:11

Yeah, exactly. So let’s talk about the kind of starting in reverse because I know to Live, Give, Owe, Grow rolls off the tongue easily. But let’s start with give,

Anthony Saffer 1:19

So we talk about giving as a productive use of our money, right? If we want to make an impact out there in the world and do something good with our money. You know, we stress making giving a priority by doing it first. Doing it from the top, rather than waiting until the end of the month and seeing what we have left.

Alex Okugawa 1:35

You don’t want to wait till the very end because usually there’s not much leftover once you’ve permitted yourself to spend everything. But let’s talk about the second one which is growing.

Anthony Saffer 1:43

Right. So saving, it often does get said like, “Hey, make sure you pay yourself first”, for emergencies for building wealth for the long term. And that’s important, we want to put that up there to find the right amount that we should be saving. And that’s where we can use financial planning to determine what the right amount is. And then making sure that we’re putting it into the best place.

Alex Okugawa 2:02

So again, keeping this simple, right you receive some pay your first giving from that, you’re gonna do your savings from that. And then you also have the “Owe” piece, which is two pieces, right?

Anthony Saffer 2:12

It’s two pieces. So owing debt, and owing taxes, right? So with debt, there can be, you know, decent uses of debt, like a mortgage or something like that, and then consumptive uses of debt, and we want to try and minimize especially the consumptive uses of debt, but we want to minimize debt overall. And when it comes to taxes, Ron Blue likes to say that your taxes are symptomatic of earning an income, or if you have wealth and paying taxes on that. So we do want to minimize it within the rules using tax-wise strategies.

Alex Okugawa 2:44

So again, if I think about my paycheck comes in, I give from it, I grow my money, I owe it, then really everything leftover is the live portion.

Anthony Saffer 2:54

Somebody may have a specific lifestyle that they want to live. And that’s where this model can help is to say, I want to have this standard of living, and therefore everything else can go towards saving or giving. The other part of it that’s important is it can be very hard to categorize, or accurately determine what you’re spending money on. Sure, you can sit down with a pen or an Excel spreadsheet, say I’m spending this much on groceries, this much to fill up the gas tank, we find that most people are pretty inaccurate with that when it comes right down to it.

Alex Okugawa 3:25

So getting back to our example, we had someone come to us and they’re saying how much should I be saving? How much should I be giving? etc. Usually, it’s first just figuring out well, where is your money going? Because in a way, then you can visually see it. So we’ll put a pie chart up. So people kind of see what this looks like. But once you visually see where your money’s going, then you can have a proactive conversation about what do I want this to look like? How much of my income do I want to go to give? How much would I like to be saving, and usually people want to decrease the owe side, which is the debt and taxes side. So once you figure out where your money’s going, there are only five main categories, then you can figure out what do I want it to look like? And how do I make proactive steps to you know, get to where I want to be?

Anthony Saffer 4:07

That’s why this simple concept works. And that’s what we’re after is you take dozens of places your money goes and break it down into these categories. Find out where you’re at today. And then each year you can track that to the point of saying, Okay, what ones do what piece of the pie do I want to increase? What maybe do I want to decrease and then I can work on that through financial strategies.

Alex Okugawa 4:27

And now let us know what you think. How do you know where your money is going? Leave a comment below. And if you enjoy today’s video, please like and subscribe for more. Thanks for watching.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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This does not constitute an investment recommendation. Investing involves risk. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Consult your financial advisor for what is appropriate for you. Disclosures: https://onedegreeadvisors.com/solutions/#disclosures